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Asus Transformer Drops Quad-core In Favor of Dual-core

MrSeb writes with this news from Extreme Tech: "In a move that will shock and disgust bleeding-edge technophiles everywhere, Asus has announced at Mobile World Congress 2012 that its new Transformer Pads — the high-end Infinity Series — will use the recently-announced dual-core Qualcomm S4 SoC. The critically acclaimed Transformer Prime, the Infinity Series' predecessor which was released at the end of 2011, used the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3. Why the sudden about-face? Well, the fact that quad-core processors don't really have a use case in mobile devices is one reason — but it doesn't hurt that the Krait cores in the S4 are significantly faster than the four Cortex-A9 cores in the Tegra 3, too. The S4 is also the first 28nm SoC, while Tegra 3 is still on 40nm, which means a smaller and cheaper package, and lower power consumption to boot. The S4 is also the first SoC with built-in LTE, which was probably a rather nice sweetener for Asus." The Snapdragon S4 "Krait" CPU is still a bit shrouded in mystery as far as hard specs (Qualcomm has never been one to release docs), but it appears to be similar to the Cortex-A15 in performance; how they stand up to Intel's new Medfield designs remains to be seen.

19 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Right tool for the job by Vollernurd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In other words after carefully considering all their options and went with the one that offered the best overall package, whilst keeping the price point competetive? Not nerd willy-waving, then? Jolly good.

    --
    Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
    1. Re:Right tool for the job by gsslay · · Score: 5, Funny

      I have to agree with the article. I am shocked and disgusted beyond measure.

      I'm just not sure why. Maybe I need further desensitising against run of the mill tech news.

  2. Core count obsession by Cryacin · · Score: 4, Informative

    Why is everyone obsessed at the number of cores? The more processors you ahve, the more complex scheduling your apps needs to perform to actually work faster. It's better to hav ea single core that is twice as fast, than two cores running in parallel.

    --
    Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
    1. Re:Core count obsession by snowgirl · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why is everyone obsessed at the number of cores? The more processors you ahve, the more complex scheduling your apps needs to perform to actually work faster. It's better to hav ea single core that is twice as fast, than two cores running in parallel.

      Pfff... actually, the Tegra 3 has five cores, four of them are high-performance, and one is high-efficiency. The CPU is designed to shutdown the four cores for almost nearly everything, and just use the high-efficiency core in order to save on battery life.

      So seriously, most of the time, the number of cores doesn't even matter, because unless you're playing a high-end game, the cores won't even be woken up.

      --
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    2. Re:Core count obsession by Theophany · · Score: 5, Funny

      Everybody knows more cores = more bitches. Nobody wants to be 'that single (core) guy' who is forever alone at the bar.

    3. Re:Core count obsession by Psiren · · Score: 4, Informative

      So seriously, most of the time, the number of cores doesn't even matter, because unless you're playing a high-end game, the cores won't even be woken up.

      So, unless I was buying a tablet specifically to play high end games on, why would I want to spend money on CPU cores that are going to sit there doing nothing? Surely a dual core CPU is a better move?

    4. Re:Core count obsession by mikael_j · · Score: 4, Informative

      More cores means better multitasking since threads can run in parallel. Also, even for handheld devices you are unlikely to find, for example, a single-core CPU that is four times faster than each core of a quad-core CPU.

      Another major advantage of multi-core systems is if a poorly written piece of software locks up it is highly likely to also be single-threaded and your system will chug along nicely despite the misbehaving program, allowing you to kill the process (by comparison, on a single-core system you're likely to suffer through five minutes of waiting for the system to respond before you are able to kill the process). Sure, in an ideal world this wouldn't happen but when it does happen it's nice to not be locked out of your system because of a single process misbehaving.

      --
      Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
    5. Re:Core count obsession by errandum · · Score: 4, Insightful

      For 99.9% of the games, I'd say yes, if the Dual Core represents better better overall performance and compatibility with other things (like LTE) out of the box. The tablet is not made for that 0.1% that only wants to play that one game that makes use of the 4 cores... It's made for those that use those tablets for what they seem to be designed for (with a dock and everything...): Light work stations and media centers (that give it the 18 hour batteries.

      I, for one, applaud this move. Core hype will get you nowhere in the long run.

    6. Re:Core count obsession by Elrond,+Duke+of+URL · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The whole "core" obsession on mobile devices seems to be nothing but marketing talk. At least, as far as I have been able to determine.

      I have a Droid 3 which has a dual-core CPU and using System Tuner I found that the second core was always shown as "offline". Doing some research online I found that the second core is kept offline to preserve battery life. Supposedly, it only comes online if the load is particularly high.

      But, no matter what I did on the phone, I could never get the second core to come online. Using one of the tweaks available in System Tuner, I can apparently force both cores to be online all the time. However, the second core is still shown as offline and I still can't seem to get it to come online via high usage. Also, battery life doesn't seem to have changed.

      So, this wonderful second core seems to be entirely useless and nothing but an item for the marketing checklist on the advertisements.

      Bah...

      --
      Elrond, Duke of URL
      "This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
    7. Re:Core count obsession by billcopc · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The average user doesn't have the slighest idea how threading works nor why having more cores might be overkill. To them, it's just yet another number that must be increased. They look to us geeks, with our multi-core and multi-socket systems, and figure that's where they want to be once the prices come down. They're like kids emulating adults, and just as stubborn when I try to explain that the average human does NOT need a 12-core workstation with 48 gigs of Ram. It's hard enough convincing them that a Gigabit router won't make their DSL go faster than a 10/100 one, and they go absolutely retarded when they find out I use 10G fibre NICs.

      This is what I tried to explain to my not-so-technical friend, who would ask me if the 4-core tablet was better than the 2-core one, and then ignored anything I said. It's a tablet, you don't multitask much on it. You're not running 50 torrents in the background, while your virus scanner eats a whole core protecting you from yourself, and trying to play a Youtube 1080p walkthrough on your second display while you follow along in Starcraft II on the main screen. It's a fuckin' tablet. One app at a time. If that app is smart enough to offload background tasks to a 2nd core, I'm already impressed. It's a very different computing experience from a desktop PC, and even there, most people get by just fine with a dual-core desktop. The mere fact that almost every computing device today has a dedicated GPU, it's like an extra "core" right there, in that it frees up the main CPU to do something else.

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      -Billco, Fnarg.com
    8. Re:Core count obsession by Bill_the_Engineer · · Score: 4, Informative

      More cores means better multitasking since threads can run in parallel. Also, even for handheld devices you are unlikely to find, for example, a single-core CPU that is four times faster than each core of a quad-core CPU.

      According to Amdahl you're looking at 1 / [( 1 - P ) + (P/N)] where N = number of processors and P is the percentage of a program that could run parallel. So if 75% of a program can be made to run in parallel on a quad-core processor we are looking at 1/[(1-0.75)+(0.75/4)] = 2.29, so we are looking at a maximum speed increase of 2.29 times the speed of a single processor not 4 times.

      Another major advantage of multi-core systems is if a poorly written piece of software locks up it is highly likely to also be single-threaded and your system will chug along nicely despite the misbehaving program, allowing you to kill the process (by comparison, on a single-core system you're likely to suffer through five minutes of waiting for the system to respond before you are able to kill the process).

      I haven't seen this. In fairly modern operating systems you'll have multiple services in operation. This means you'll most likely have more threads in execution than there are cores. Context switches between threads within a core of a multi-core processor will still need to be made. I've had a misbehaving program slow down an embedded multi-core processor board because we were "unlucky" that the OS scheduler was running on one of the same cores and other resources on the processor board were being committed by the errant process (eg. Memory, I/O ports, etc.) so the system is not as foolproof as you'd like since memory takes time to to swap, and deadlocks across cores can happen when a computing resource is shared.

      Sure, in an ideal world this wouldn't happen but when it does happen it's nice to not be locked out of your system because of a single process misbehaving.

      It really is a speed versus power issue. In an embedded environment, where one would hope that the system was well tested prior to being released to the public, such a safety net is really not required.

      --
      These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
    9. Re:Core count obsession by Haxagon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Okay, you made a whole hubbub about choice, but still haven't explained why quad-core would be a good choice. I think the debate is over whether or not quad-core is worth it, not if there should be a right to choose.

  3. Re:Who gives a damn about cores, does it work? by errandum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    In a website like this, yes, people care about that. You seem to be lost, the appstore is that way --->.

  4. Summary wrong again? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    From what I articles I saw yesterday I gathered that there would be two levels of the new Asus pads. One with the Tegra and the other with the new Krait. Here is one article that talks about it: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5586/the-asus-transformer-pad-infinity-1920-x-1200-display-krait-optional

    Of course we won't know anything for sure until Asus releases the product details.

  5. Re:What happened with odd-core configurations? by bemymonkey · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Your SGS2 is configured wrong. You should be getting a standby drain of about 1%/hour (or less) with sync enabled.

    Two things are at fault here, of course:

    1. The awful apps that keep the phone awake and active during standby - for instance: Facebook
    2. Android, for not telling the user THIS APP IS KEEPING YOUR PHONE AWAKE, KICK THAT CRAP!

    In your specific case: Check your battery usage (in your SGS2's settings), and find out which process is keeping your phone awake, either with the old battery history (Gingerbread and earlier, accessible via Spare Parts, apps like BatteryMonitorWidget or a dialer code that varies from handset to handset) or (ICS only - because someone at Google decided to remove the battery history) with an app like BetterBatteryStats.

    The interesting part is usually partial wake usage. Eliminate the apps causing the most partial wake usage, and you'll have a power draw of next to nothing. Standby battery life with Google sync, a few IM clients (I run Skype and imo.im), Whatsapp, Viber and so on, should be around 4-5 days.

  6. First HTC drops its quad core chip for a dual core by AlienIntelligence · · Score: 4, Interesting

    First HTC suddenly drops its quad core chip for a dual in a phone that
    was supposed to have a quad core chip since it was leaked back in July.

    And days later, Asus drops a quad in favor of a dual core.

    Same chip was dropped.

    Someone... is keeping a secret. There is a problem with the quad core
    chip and 'something' new(er) that is appearing in the phones. I read that
    an LTE chip appeared in the "One X", while the quad core disappeared.

    Is LTE and quad core not playing nice? Are there production shortages?
    Overheating issues, battery issues?

    The whole story isn't out. I'm curious what it is. I've been waiting
    and salivating at the promised "Quad" core offerings for smartphones.
    The Samsung SIII is supposedly going to have one, but from a different
    company, their own Exynos chip. So, we won't see that quad be cut in half.

    Hopefully.

    Regardless of what the non-power users say about not needing more cores,
    I see my dual cores maxed out regularly. I need the extras, I was willing to
    sell my life, I mean soul, I mean sign a new 2 year contract for it.

    -AI

    --
    For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
  7. Misinformed by TheBogBrushZone · · Score: 5, Informative

    They announced two Infinity models. Once of them has LTE/3G and the dual-core S4, the other is Wi-fi only and is still toting a 1.6GHz Tegra 3.

    --
    And behold, a command prompt and he who sat upon it, his name was shutdown and -h 3:11 followed with him
  8. Re:Skype on standby by bemymonkey · · Score: 4, Informative

    Android has some sort of a built-in low power push-like mechanism that was implemented starting with Android 2.2 (Froyo), called C2DM. It's not quite real push, but the battery life is stupid good.

    I'd assume Skype uses C2DM, as do most IM apps...

    http://code.google.com/android/c2dm/

  9. Re:maybe the article is flat out wrong by fast+turtle · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The problem is, the Tegra does not have an LTE radio/modem on the SoC. This means it's a seperate chip and the current chips do not pla nicely with the Tegra. Qualcomn has pulled a major upset with their new design as the SnapDragon is faster, uses less power and includes the needed LTE radio on the die. The only area where the Qualcomn offering sucks tits on a worm is graphics as the Tegra beats the hell out of it like a red headed step-child but that's the only thing it wins.

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